Winter Camp gathering shows the value of channels between free software projects and their constituents

Last week I was privileged (mining that term for its multiple
connotations) to engage with 150 other people in a unique and moving
set of experiences at an event called
Winter Camp.
My
first impressions,
based on just readings and a few early meetings, already demonstrated
the engagement we all felt.
My
next report
was generated in the heat of our work and reflected an almost
fairy-tale atmosphere. A couple days after the end, I can cull some
lessons for open source programmers and projects, as well as for
people in other networks trying to make change.

The inquiry driving Winter Camp, sponsored and run by the
Institute of Network Cultures,
seemed austere and academic enough despite an explicitly political
tinge involving the empowerment of people who are not currently
represented in social decisions. We were here to explore how we could
improve the effectiveness of far-flung groups (which we called
"networks").

It was the unique characteristics of the participants--unique in our
diversity as well as in what we held in common--that led to the week's
emotional intensity.

Be Your Constituents

But first some ideas for free software development. I came here not as
an O'Reilly representative but as a volunteer with
FLOSS Manuals,
a nonprofit devoted to creating open books. For a free software
development team, we're an unusual collection of people. Most are
directly involved in the project are artists and many are educators.
This might make us more sensitive to the reactions of the people for
whom we're developing the project.

I hate using the term "users" for these people. Not only does the word
have ugly connotations; it draws a reprehensible border around the
ways those people can interact and contribute, just as much as would
the term "consumers." Pursuing the theme of artists doing software
development, I have tried considering these people an "audience"
instead. But in a fascinating conversation I had this morning with
researcher Ned Rossiter, one of the Winter Camp organizers, he
criticized the metaphor of"audience" as an undifferentiated and
passive mass. He suggested the term "constituents" instead. The search
for the perfect term is ongoing.

Perhaps an artist's sensitivity explains why FLOSS Manuals has met the
constituents' needs more effectively than the scads of other free
documentation projects that have been tried over the years. Do we have
some practices in common with other successful free software projects?

An old saw about free software, which has quite a bit of truth, is
that programmers create excellent interfaces for tools aimed at
programmers like themselves, but compare unfavorably to proprietary
equivalents when the tools are for other constituents.

Some of the best free tools for artists and other creative people may
have overcome this limitation. But it's a constant challenge for free
software. We may still be operating in the shadow of the early hacker
ideal that was alive in the age before the PC, when hackers thought
anyone who cared about information should become a master programmer
himself.

The advent of universal computing drove hackers to modify their ideal,
with its deceptively elitism, and to competed instead with proprietary
companies to provide easy-to-use point-and-click tools. But this
success has created an inherent gap between their view of the software
and the constituents' view.

The constituency for a free software tool normally hovers faceless in
the background. From the viewpoint of software developers, all too
often, the constituents are represented by a bunch of whiny forum
postings asking why the software doesn't work the way they expected.

For well-established projects, conferences can briefly bring together
programmers and their constituents. But conferences are sporadic and
expensive. Putting key representatives of the constituents on project
boards also helps, but we all know from forays into politics that
listening to a representative is far less effective than providing
channels for direct input to all the people being represented.

One of the joys of Winter Camp, for me, was a chance to build
alliances with our constituents--with educators, artists, and political
activists who use free software every day and want documentation--and
to request their active help. Our challenge is to sustain the
collaboration beyond this week.

Free software could benefit from more such intense inclusivity. Just
as software engineering practice has moved beyond the isolated
programmer model (where requirements are thrown over the wall into the
developer's cubicle and his code is thrown over another wall to the
testers), free software needs mass constituent participation.

When I started this blog, I titled this section "Know Your
Constituents." After writing the first couple paragraphs, I changed
the title to its current text. I think this totality of identification
is crucial for software development. For FLOSS Manuals in particular,
certain goals of founder Adam Hyde helped us get where we are today:

Making contribution easy while preserving an effective structure to documents

Creating attractive output both online and in print

Putting in extra effort to do things that are hard to do, such as
providing translations into many languages

We still need to do more in several areas, in my opinion:

Figuring out how to make the project sustainable, which of course
involves regular income

Ensuring documentation's quality and accuracy

Ensuring that contributors are recognized

Even in our current early stage, FLOSS Manuals has progressed quickly.
It has been chosen by friends of One Laptop Per Child and the Sugar
project to do a series of manuals, and this has earned FLOSS Manuals
attention from other free software constituents. We discovered so much
interest at Winter Camp (where several members of other networks had
written for our books) that we set up a special talk attended by over
twenty people from other projects. Now we're intensifying our roll-out of
new projects.

As for me, I'll participate on the weekend of March 21-22 in a project
at the Free Software Foundation in Boston: a book on how to use the
command line. I hope Boston-area hackers can come there and
contribute.

Unbalanced challenges

The feeling that we had more at stake in this gathering than academic
inquiry came quickly, as we heard stories from political activists at
winter Camp. Some people here are in exile from their home
countries. One participant,
Issa Nyaphaga,
was arrested and tortured in Cameroon for his political cartoons. He
then spent twelve years going from one host country to another without
a passport, leaving his family behind. He is now a successful artist
and teacher in New York City.

We saw a bit of one participant's film about destructive ecological
practices by oil companies in Nigeria. Other people deliberately set
up home in underprivileged areas to help educate or organize the poor;
others collect funds and provide houses for artists forced into exile.

The second day of the gathering brought an Amsterdam political
organizer who asked us to join a
protest
in support of undocumented immigrants being held in a jail near the
airport. I have a lot I could say about immigration politics in the
US, but I feel unqualified as a guest to take a stand about
immigration politics in the Netherlands. Still, one tiny incident I
heard from a Winter Camp participant is relevant.

He had attended a demonstration at the airport and held up signs to
show support for the jailed immigrants. The guards inside the jail
closed the shutters so that the inmates couldn't see the
demonstrators. That small act of severance is hard to appreciate
unless one understands the isolation and helplessness that attends
imprisonment. The guards could probably justify their action, perhaps
by citing fears of inmate unrest. (But what is more likely to generate
unrest: optimism or despair?) Whatever your stand on immigration,
censorship needs to be protested whether it involves putting filters
on Internet service providers or closing the shutters in a jail.

I have already mentioned that the political goals of the gathering's
organizers played a subordinate role in the invitation, which stressed
questions about forming and sustaining networks. It's remarkable,
therefore, how much the final participants agreed with the organizers'
political goals. It's even more remarkable when you look at how the
invitations went out--a very decentralized process.

The organizers chose a dozen networks to invite, heavily relying so
far as I can see on an old-boy network of their own. (I believe that
every network had at least one leading resident in the Netherlands.)
The leader of each network then chose members to represent the network
at the gathering. Some were small enough to invite everybody, whereas
others worked out the invitee list through various planning
mechanisms. A lot depending on who happened to be free, who could put
aside family responsibilities for a week, and so on.

But this ad hoc, almost arbitrary invitation mechanism led to an
extremely cohesive network philosophically and politically. If anyone
who considered himself a centrist or moderate happened by accident to
find his way to Winter Camp, he must have spent his time cowering
under the stairwell. I think the invitation process in itself is a
fascinating experiment in establishing conformity.

Stress and articulation

I myself come out of political movements whose slogan is "Organize the
unorganized," but in the context of Winter Camp the slogan is less
about unionizing impoverished day laborers and more about trying to
negotiate the limits of discipline among people whose careers are
devoted to fighting organizations.

Some participants were so wedded to "horizontalism" and anti-elitism
that they hate to use terms such as "institution-building" (because to
them, "institution" means a large corporation or oppressive
government). As sophisticated intellectuals, they should be able to
redefine "institutionalization" as the evolution of their favorite
modes of interaction into stable formations.

Radical visions are fine to start with, but one can't posture as
someone who has never compromised with the world as it is in order to
survive--never turned in a school essay, never written a grant
proposal, never presented a passport at border control. You need a
strategy for moving from one institution to another, no matter how
radical your critique; I have been convinced of this by seeing the
consequences of failed states.

And of course these earnest networkers included people who tried to pull
rank or who used their erudition to subtly devalue other people's
contributions, human failings that have to be addressed by any quest
for social improvement.

The struggles of the networks to translate ideals into expression came
out on the final day, as each network was given twenty minutes to
present the results of their week's work.

FLOSS Manuals offered a pretty standard, frontal presentation--perhaps
even a boring one, I admit. But we had accomplished a lot, and wanted
to boast about it:

We've defined key functions--coding, web design, finance, public
relations--and made a commitment to replace our reliance on a single
individual with a team in each area

We made plans to contact like-minded organizations for guidance on how
to cheaply and efficiently fix our key gaps in governance and finance.

Two coders developed a database schema for our new back-end.

Two designers scrutinized the current web site and made some changes
to allow easier interaction and show the most important features.

We started a manual on how to write a manual. This project
particularly appeals to me. There are shelves' worth of textbooks and
professional guides for technical writing, but none that we've found
focuses on the needs experienced by today's online communities or
takes into account the new technologies and social environments of
online information production.

How did other networks use their twenty minutes? A few put together
creative impressions of their experience, but usually failed to answer
the question of what they had learned or accomplished. Some networks
did not let their anti-hierarchism stand in the way of delivering
twenty-minute lectures in opposition to hierarchy.

One network opened the floor and encouraged audience members to talk
to each other. They wandered through the theater offering to talk and
answer questions, but refused to allow microphones in order to combat
centralism.

Many people in the audience, of course, grabbed this moment to open
their laptops. I'm happy to report that many of us tried to use the
opportunity in the spirit in which it was offered. I flagged down a
member of the network and asked what I felt was the key question in
this context, whether you are schmoozing at a conference, going onto
LinkedIn, or arriving in a new town: who is worth talking to? We
agreed on a fairly standard response: that the solution is to make
connections, and that certain people are well-positioned or specially
skilled to be connectors.

I don't want to leave the impression of a dour or cantankerous
gathering; in fact I found the general tone to be the joy of
discovering news and new connections. The week's events ended with a
dance, music being furnished by the participants. This polyglot crew
was slow to set sail on the embedded spaciality of the non-vocal, but
once we got going we really rocked.

Further steps

All these people are doing wonderful things back home. Whenever I sat
down with an artist, activist, or coder, I came away impressed. The
problem is that when a network discusses what brought them together,
the individual achievements get leached out and what's left is a bunch
of abstractions that all sound the same. So I did not manage to
answer, for myself, the question of how networking can add new
strength to individual efforts.

The answer will have to come from post-gathering analysis by the
network organizers. They're in a good position to find out something,
I think. The dropped into our meetings regularly, although they didn't
interrupt us and try to make us self-conscious about what we were
doing. They carried out two dozen interviews on videotape. (I don't
know yet whether these will go online.) And they've asked us for
explicit feedback. I'll be interested to see the next turn in this
spiral of practice and research.